“Carceral Conservationism: Contested Landscapes and Technologies of Dispossession at Ka‘ena Point, Hawai‘i”

This essay analytically links two fences in Hawai‘i into a genealogy of military occupation. The two fences are not linked spatially, and they differ: the US military encloses Mākua for war preparation, while the State of Hawai‘i constructed the fence at Ka‘ena for a wildlife reserve, producing a space amenable to tourism. Nevertheless, both fences interrupt, manage, and control land-based relationships to reconsolidate and legitimize state authority in the face of powerful grassroots claims to land. Carceral conservationism describes the territorial compromise between grassroots efforts for environmental self-determination and state imperatives to control land and natural resources.